From May 11th until June 30th, 2018, Dellupi Arte gallery is delighted to present the exhibition Shōzō Shimamoto. Recent Works, a solo show dedicated to the Japanese Master and co-founder of the Gutai Artistic Movement, born in 1954 in the Kansai region of Japan. Considered to be among the most audacious and experimental interpreters of post-World War II, Shōzō Shimamoto’s research commences with the strong personality of fellow artist Jirō Yoshihara (1905-1972). Inspired by the works of Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu, in which we «perceive – as Yoshihara writes in the Gutai Manifesto of 1956 – the shrieks of the material but can feel the mutual need for vitality», the artistic movement promotes a new language that cuts with the traditional expressive criterions and represents an instinctive liberation of creativity, departing the traditional Japanese pictorial gestures and aiming at unrevealed and original expressive approaches.

The exhibition – which comprises about a dozen works including paintings and sculptures – shows some of the paintings created with the technique of color casting, the Bottle Crash. Shimamoto uses for the first time the technique of color casting in 1956, in an impressive performance for the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition when he crafts a rudimentary cannon by hand to shoot bags of color on a monumental canvas suspended among trees. Later that year, he accomplishes his first real Bottle Crashes: vigorously throwing bottles filled with different pigments against a boulder placed on the ground in the middle of a large canvas.

Among the exhibited works created using this technique: Silk Road 19 (2006-07) and Magi 908, performed in 2008, where fragments of glass, tangible traces of the performance and the explosive throws of the artist are visible mixed with the color on the surface of the canvas. The latter, created at the MAGI ‘900 Museum in Pieve di Cento (Bologna), is the result of an intense performance, in which the artist has launched various color containers on some sculptures (Magi 948) and on large textile sheets spread on the floor while accompanied by music. Still dating back to 2008, there are also a couple of works realized during a performance at Punta Campanella (Naples) – Punta Campanella 14 and Punta Campanella 09 – in which the artist also engaged a group of dancers in wedding dress, bearing on their heads glasses full of color. Dating back to 2003, the work Venice Biennale 04 is realized in that year on the occasion of the Master’s presentation of the Brain Academy Apartment Project.